In June, just after the merger of Compaq and HP, we spoke to Don Brady, formerly with Compaq and now with the newly merged company for his perspectives, which can be read here. For an update on the situation, Directions Magazine spoke with Jim Skog, GIS Business Development manager about the new products as well as his perspective on the current state of the hardware industry as it applies to GIS.Below, we discussed the slowing of the IT spending and whether GIS has been affected by the general industry malaise as well as the adoption of PDA-based GIS applications.
DM: What markets have your targeted
within the GIS community?
Skog: Within the GIS community
there is sort of a broad "power-user" base, but the ones who will jump
on this fastest is the government sector where people are being mobile
professionals, command and control applications, and maybe the urban simulation
area where they want to be able to do a "fly-through" in a mobile device.
DM: Do you see a trend in corporate
environments where they are replacing desktop units with a laptop?
Skog: Anywhere you have a
mobile professional; people do not want to have a mobile machine and a
desktop machine.They want to put a port on the desk so you can plug into
it, and have a LAN connection, and maybe a larger graphics screen.Although
this is a pretty sleek graphics screen; we have a 15-inch thin film technology
and it has a choice of two levels of high-end graphics.There is definitely
a trend to equip a mobile professional, such as engineers in utilities
and telcos, to have their whole dataset online with them.
DM: I have been very impressed
with demonstrations from Intergraph, ESRI, and MapInfo, and their demonstrations
of their PDA-based software.
Skog: I am surprised at how
fast ArcPAD
has been accepted and how many licenses are out there.The adoption rate
and the success of that product have rather surprised me.
DM: A great deal of that is due
to Compaq's "smothering" the market with iPAQ's.
Skog: Well I guess we are
doing our job right!
DM: How have you seen IT spending
in the GIS market? How hard has the GIS market been affected by the IT
slowdown?
Skog: GIS usage is so broad
that if I look at different segments, Telco excluded since there are not
going to spend any money; it has to be pretty painful before the replace
anything.Utilities are hunkered down.They are not going to be in any
buying mode but they will replace things.In the public sector, I see things
really continuing to accelerate.Part of that is homeland defense and part
of that is the sophistication of the leading cities in using their GIS
tools and how they talk about them....the envy that that creates in other
counties and cities that say, "I wish we had that..." so they have to "belly-up"
to make that kind of investment to get there.The whole "e-government revolution
is, I think, catching on.
DM: How is HP's PDA strategy focused
on the location-based services market?
Skog: What I see is that
the PDA acceptance has spawned a lot more desire for people to be mobile.
GIS is really a mobile industry in the sense that it is about where you
are and that you do not always have to be in the office.This box that
we have has a really great backplane of I/O devices and I/O connections.
DM: Just because we have seen
so many iPAQ's and HP machines, more than what we have seen from other
computer vendors such as IBM or Gateway, HP and Compaq seemed to have put
a focus on GIS as a market to go after.Now with the merger, does it have
a high visibility at the upper levels of HP management?
Skog: I think it does.And
it does from both sides, from the HP perspective and from the Compaq perspective.
When you put the two together, we are clearly the information technology
leader in terms of the hardware side of the solution in the GIS industry.
From the iPAQs and the laptops, to the desktops and the servers, we just
have a number one position with every software partner.I have counterparts
in Europe and Asia Pacific.Then we have people in the workstation product
line, from server product line, the printer product line, we all kind of
focus together as a virtual team and bring all that messaging together
to the point where we probably derive $300 million per year from this segment.
It is definitely a large and growing segment.
DM: Can we expect to see bundled
packages of iPAQ's with mobile workstations?
Skog: Absolutely, in fact
we are running a bundled promotion now with ESRI
on homeland security.